Few may know that China is actually the world's fifth-largest oil producer, at 3.7 million barrels per day (bpd), just below Iran and slightly over Mexico. In 1980, China consumed only 3% of the world's oil. Now it's already around 10% - the world's second-largest consumer, overtaking Japan but still way behind the US at 27%.

It would be far harder to suspend that morality, if all realised, there was no exile and that those pesky Palestinians are the remains of the original Jewish inhabitants. Such a realisation could spur momentum for a just resolution.

he Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington estimates that after nearing $1,500bn in the current fiscal year – more than three times the previous record – the deficit is likely to remain close to an annual $1,000bn until 2020 or later.-- It expects net external debt to rise from $3,500bn today to as much as $50,000bn, or 140 per cent of GDP, over the same period.

If rewards are bestowed according to mere reputation, and punishments are inflicted according to mere defamation, then men who love rewards and hate punishments will discard the law of the public and practice self-seeking tricks and associate for wicked purposes. If ministers forget the interest of the sovereign, make friends with outside people, and thereby promote their adherents, then their inferiors will be in low spirits to serve the sovereign. Their friends are many; their adherents, numerous. When they form juntas in and out, then though they have great faults, their ways of disguise will be innumerable.

Frank Luntz's pollsters and focus groups have apparently found that the argument that the Republicans now proffer (as they did in 1993), that covering the uninsured is interpreted by many middle-class Americans as forcing them to share use of the specimen room with the underclass, resonates powerfully all across all but the bluest of blue-state America.